The Rock of Battle (The Lost Book 6) by Peter Nealen

Author:Peter Nealen [Nealen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WarGate Books
Published: 2022-12-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

The retreat to the third wall wasn’t quite a rout, but it was awfully close.

With the second wall breached, Tarvedum had ordered the recall sounded. There was nothing to be gained by trying to hold the remaining fragments of the rampart. We would only lose hundreds more, men we would need when they came at the third wall.

Whether or not they’d last much longer at the third wall, with the dragon in the mix, was another question.

The Peruni and the Avurs were still too far away to engage any of the surviving Galel as they drew back off the wall and headed for the next gate, offset from the second by nearly three hundred yards. That gave us a bit of breathing room, especially since the ground between the walls wasn’t exactly even or flat, but the dragon made that a mixed blessing.

It wasn’t alone, either. More of the wyverns flapped and screamed in its wake, stooping on fleeing men and seizing them in their talons, lifting them screaming into the air as they tore at their prey’s necks and guts. Some of the archers paused to try to shoot at the flying monsters, and several scored hits, but the arrows didn’t seem to do enough damage to slow them down. Bullets did better, but again, it took a lot of concentrated fire to knock one of those things out of the sky, and we couldn’t exactly go to ground out there in the open.

I glanced over my shoulder as we ran up the hill toward the third wall. The smashed and broken bodies of men in the multicolored livery of the Galel lay amid the blackened and dust-covered ruin of the nearest breach, men who had been thrown there when the dragon had struck. The dead from the fight at the wall the day before had all been carefully taken up and prepared for burial, even the enemy.

The dragon swooped down again, blasting a glowing furrow in the rock with another flickering bolt of lightning and sending the shattered and smoking bodies of our allies flying. It dipped even lower and snatched a man up with one taloned paw, crushing him as it climbed back into the sky, making his blood rain down on the men below.

I shot at it out of sheer defiance, then kept running. There was no way to stand and fight it then and there.

It was a struggle to get up that last few dozen yards to the wall and would have been even if I hadn’t been hauling the .50 in my hands. A hail of arrows and sling stones were being shot at the dragon and the wyverns, but a lot of the men up on the battlements were a little too focused on trying to fight the monsters, and in their fear, they had forgotten that what goes up must come down. We were dodging iron-tipped shafts, rocks, and lead shot as we ran, and I saw several Galel men-at-arms go down to their own people’s arrows.

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